These pages on the Ubuntu Linux operating system are brought to you by The Owlcroft Company, an internet publisher. While we make no claims
whatever to be computer gurus in general or Ubuntu experts in particular, we are, we think, pretty good at "data mining", and have accumulated a lot of valuable Ubuntu-related information from all across the web. Moreover,
this is not unqualified scraping: everything here is something we have actually done on several different Ubuntu systems; in many cases, that meant weeding through a lot of well-intentioned but partly or wholly incorrect
advice by trial and error.

We assume that those coming here already know why, of the available flavors of Linux, Ubuntu already--and rightly--has the lion's share, and is still growing, in both absolute and percentgae-share terms. But if you aren't
sure, you can and should look at the Ubuntu home page, as well as the Wikipedia article on Ubuntu.

These procedures were tested on several diverse sets of hardware; nonetheless, they may not have universal applicability. Further, these procedures apply to one specific flavor of Ubuntu: Ubuntu desktop 64-bit version
10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat"; though they do not necessarily apply to Kubuntu or 32-bit systems or older versions, they by and large will (and will certainly be illustrative of general methods and concepts). This is
also all about a complete, fresh, single-OS system: if you want to have Ubuntu co-exist on your system with some Other Operating System, you will need advice from elsewhere.

All said, we hope and believe that there is an awful lot here of usefulness to any user of any version of Ubuntu. We have the solutions for problems from no logoff sound playing to getting a TIFF-format doc viewer for
Firefox; we show how to successfully install a Canon iP1800 printer, and how to avoid deadly Thunderbird mail bloat. Take a look--you'll probably find something of use no matter how experienced you may already be in
Ubuntu.

Table of Contents

This set of pages "jes' growed",and is now of some length. We feel strongly that to get best value from it all, you would do well to--as the Red King famously said to Alice--"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Afterwards you can return to any particular place of interest. Nonetheless, as a convenience, and to indicate the scope of what we have here, we present this table. Or, if you prefer, you can instead now simply jump on to the start of the first "real" page here, on Pre-Installation Considerations.

Besides the main body of documentation idexed below, there is a small, short page of "miscellaneous" thoughts not yet
integrated into the full document. As that suggests, this document is a living one, and will grow and change from time to time: if you find it of interest or use, it would pay to check back now and again to see if anything
has been added or changed (something for which this index will be especially helpful).